The extreme importance of taking timely medication and, when taking certain combinations of pharmaceuticals, making sure that they are administered in a proper sequence is obvious to those skilled in the medical field. However, heretofore, no dependable, simple means of administering various pharmaceutical preparations in a timed and sequenced manner was available to those under medication. The importance of this cannot be overemphasized since those versed in pharmacodynamics understand the serious difficulties which may result in excessive dosage or failure to maintain sufficient levels of drugs in the body's system to be an effective treatment for a particular malady. This may be further aggravated by the side actions of certain drugs which can diminish an individual's mental capacity i.e., memory or awareness of his actions. Further, as is frequently the case, the chronically ill and the eldery patients are often prescribed a plurality of drugs, vitamins or curative substances whose frequency and sequence may be difficult to keep track of, even with full control of one's faculties. Moreover, since the rate of absorption or detoxification of various drugs to be admininistered during the course of a day may vary widely, it is essential that a record or chart be utilized to be sure the proper medicament is taken with a suitable elapsed time between doses. Generally, as is the case with most people, these records are not kept up and errors can and often do occur; sometimes with fatal consequences.
The effects of administering repeated doses of some drugs may be cumulative if insufficient time has elapsed between doses resulting in a variety of serious side actions, especially in regard to the nervous system, cardiovascular system or respiration system or even in the gastrointestinal track. Further, it is frequently required for some patients to be prescribed a buffer medicament to lessen or eliminate the adverse effects of particular prescribed pharmaceutical preparations.
Past methods of drug dispensing typically provided a pill container with a cap therefor which carried a time indicator that was set manually to the time interval when a next pill was to be taken. However, when a plurality of diverse types of pills and/or capsules are required by a patient, it is exceedingly difficult to use these cap mounted time indicators as an effective means for drug dispensing.
Contraceptive pill dispensers are also known but these devices rely on memory and are generally dispensed only at the rate of approximately one per day, there being no signal device to alert the user that a given preselected pill is to be taken.
It would therefore be a decided advance in the art to provide a drug dispenser which would automatically advise a patient under medication exactly when to take a specific pill selected from a series of pills which are to be taken over the course of a day and which series of pills are conveniently carried by the drug dispenser.